Clewiston Struggles With U.S. Sugar Shutdown

CLEWISTON | Welcome to "America's Sweetest Town" - born, built and raised on sugar, a true workingman's community in the sweaty heartland of the Everglades.

The Sugarland Highway slices through the palm tree-lined downtown, past the Cuttin Up Barber Shop, the Common Grounds coffee shop and the American flags flapping atop businesses and light poles.

The annual Sugar Festival draws thousands. Cars sport bumper stickers reading "Sugar: Just 15 calories a spoonful." And Sugar Realty offers "the sweetest deal in town."

But with this week's announcement that Clewiston's dominant employer, U.S. Sugar Corp., will likely go out of business in six years, many residents and workers are pondering life in a company town without a company and wondering how the community will survive.

Nearly 80 years after it formed here during the Great Depression, U.S. Sugar plans to sell some 300 square miles around Clewiston to the state, which wants the land as part of its plan to clean up the Everglades. Agriculture, like sugar and citrus, has long stymied restoration efforts, blocking water flow and adding pollutants from fertilizers to the ecosystem.

The sale of the nation's largest producer of cane sugar means 1,700 workers will be left jobless, not to mention the spinoff effects on Clewiston businesses that depend on them as customers.

U.S. Sugar is the heart of Clewiston, literally - the town is built around the company's two-story red brick headquarters, and the mill is just down the road.

News of the shutdown landed "somewhere between getting punched in the stomach and food poisoning," said Greg Thompson, 38, who has been with the company for 20 years and is head of the local sugar union.

"Everyone felt like the breath had been knocked out of them," Thompson said.

It's not all bad news for the workers, though.

Under the $1.75 billion deal, hourly employees will get a year's pay as severance, while salaried workers will get two years' pay. Because the company is partially employee owned, those who are vested will receive about $350 per share.

The company declined to provide details on how many shares an average employee owns. Thompson, who also wouldn't reveal details, said employees were starting to count up their shares "to see if they'd be able to pick up and move somewhere else."

For many who have worked at the mill, on the railroad and in the fields for decades, the news was a stunner. The company kept its negotiations with the state secret. Employees were told about the deal with the rest of the world, through a news conference Tuesday.

"It's really something," said U.S. Sugar railroad mechanic Tom Owens, 44, as he rubbed his hand firmly across his forehead, smearing the sweaty grit below his ball cap's bill.

"I'm third generation. This community lives on sugar," Owens said.

Ramon Iglesias, 36, manager of Roland Martins Marina and Resort alongside Lake Okeechobee, has lived his whole life in this town of 7,000.

"Clewiston is U.S. Sugar and it always has been," Iglesias said.

In 1931, the town near the bottom center of the state between coasts was a speck on the map, surrounded by rich, black soil, known as muck, that would later become its fortune.

Industrialist Charles Mott transformed the old, bankrupt and much smaller Southern Sugar Co. into U.S. Sugar. The company brought in sugar experts from Louisiana, Cuba and the West Indies, and by 1941, a profitable Florida sugar industry had emerged and the town began to take shape amid the tall, green stalks.

Twenty years later, when Fidel Castro stopped Cuban sugar imports into the U.S., the company began to boom, eventually operating two mills, a 200-mile railroad system and accumulating its land.

The demise of the company, which processes up to 800,000 tons of sugar a year, has rattled residents and business owners, who rely on sales to mill workers, field hands, mechanics and contractors.

But Clewiston has always been resilient, struggling back repeatedly from despair after drought, depression and a massive 1928 hurricane that killed an estimated 2,500 people in the region.